My London Adventure!

I'm back from London!!

I arrived home yesterday after an amazing weekend in this lovely city. I seriously can't believe it took me so long to visit and I won't leave it too long until I fly back over again. I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express in Stratford which is in East London. It was a bit out of the way but once Paddy and I got our heads around the Tube Map, it wasn't a problem to travel around. I've never been on anything like the London Underground, the Luas over here does not compare in the slightest. It gets so unbelievably busy lets just say I'm glad I'm not claustrophobic! The Olympic Stadium was right beside our hotel plus Westfield Stratford which is huge, we didn't even get to see all the shops in there. I doubt that centre is ever quiet, we went by the place at 11pm on the night we arrived and it was still buzzing with people.

On Saturday we went to IMATS which was a bit of a trek away from Strafford . We did a hell of a lot of walking on this trip! IMATS was really good and I was delighted I took the time to go over to London for the weekend to attend. I'm going to pop up a overview of the day on here soon. Later on in the day we took another train to Green Park to check out Buckingham Palace. After walking through a bit of Hyde Park, I wasn't expecting it to come out of nowhere like it did. The weather wasn't the nicest on the day so we didn't stick around for too long before stopping by Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.

A trip to Hampton Court was on the cards on Sunday where we visited Paddy's Sister. The weather was gorgeous which was a definite plus. We spent the day at Hampton Court Palace which I absolutely loved. There's so much history there and I found the place really interesting. We didn't get to do the whole tour, the place is huge and you'd have to take a full day to do it! The palace gardens are beautiful, seeing as it's June all the flowers were out in full bloom. They even have concerts there, Cliff Richard was playing that evening after we left. If only it was a singer we were remotely interested in. I know my Nanna would of loved him!

Before our flight home on Monday we woke up bright and early. First off we headed to Oxford Street where I stumbled upon Liberty unexpectedly and of course popped in for a bit. I didn't spend too much time on Oxford just because I wanted to fit as much into my last day as possible. Our second port of call was the British Museum, definitely a place that I'd recommend visiting if your ever in London. It's free in and there's so much too see, it's more impressive than some of the museums we have over here. Paddy is big into Ancient Egypt so we spent most of the time looking at that exhibit.

Of course the trip wouldn't have been complete without doing some shopping and I did a lot. I'll put up a haul post in the coming days. All in all I really enjoyed London and I'm already hoping to go back later this year. You definitely need more than three days to see everything. There's so much more I want to see like the Tower of London and Madame Tussauds. We tried to visit the latter on Monday but the queue was enormous and we were a bit pushed for time with our flight leaving that evening. I spotted the Sherlock Holmes statue when we were walking to the Tube though so of course I had to get a picture with that.

Are you guys heading off anywhere nice over the Summer?

Laura<3